Senator Risa Hontiveros on Tuesday, June 30 clarified that she never recommended banning Gorebox and other supposedly violent online games following the tragic shooting at a national high school in Tacloban City.

Hontiveros, in a Facebook post, explained that the Senate Committee on Women, Children, Family Relations and Gender Equality has not released any recommendation or findings on the incident and is yet to conduct its inquiry into the issue.

The Senate women and children’s panel, which the senator chairs, is set to hold a hearing on the Tacloban school shooting incident on Wednesday, July 1.

“So don't be fooled by those who spread fake news over the weekend. Let's get to the truth. The truth is that there are children who have been killed, there are parents who have lost their children, there are many more children who have been injured and deeply traumatized,” Hontiveros said in Filipino and English.

“In such a situation, when the DOJ also said that this case bears the markings of the possible influence of NVE, or Nihilistic Violent Extremism, of course, our committee would call all the stakeholders involved,” the senator stressed.

Hontiveros earlier said she will seek the help of the German Embassy after the Felix Filip, developer of the Gorebox game, has declined the committee’s invitation to its July 1 hearing.

The senator has insisted that the presence of Gorebox’s developer, who identified himself as an independent German-based game developer, is needed in the Senate hearing to shed light on the game’s safeguards, particulary its age restriction mechanisms, content moderation policies and insight on the possible effects of its exposure to young users.

This, after authorities found out that one of the suspects, a minor, in the June 22 shooting, was an avid player of the online game.

The Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) has issued a temporary ban against Gorebox following the incident.

For the hearing tomorrow, Hontiveros said the panel invited the broadest range of stakeholders—including the parents of the victims, the policewoman who was the aunt of one of the shooters, and other personalities involved during the shooting.

The panel also invited officials of the Departments of Education (DepEd), Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), and telecommunication companies, particularly Globe and Smart.

Also invited are representatives from Game Developers Association of the Philippines, Tacloban City-based police and other officials.

“Because this is a broad issue, of course it is about parental control, it is about gun access, there are many factors. But the developer of Gorebox also needs to be heard because it seems, this NVE or nihilistic violent extremism, its operation is that there are malign actors who enter into the games,” she reiterated.

“They spot and target, they try to befriend some of the kids who play there and then apparently they lure them out of the gaming platform and on to other spaces like Messenger as in the case of the Roblox hearing, where they groom kids for violence,” she pointed out.

“So, I would have wanted the Gorebox developer to be there, but if he's still not going to participate tomorrow, we will still learn a lot from our stakeholders about how to make games and how to make our whole society safer for our children, both online and of course offline, even in our schools,” she stressed.